San Francisco (CA) – Yahoo has updated its Delicious homepage using a template based on the popular TweetNews application. According to Yahoo architect Vik Singh, the site now features a “much improved” TweetNews-like system that aggregates and ranks recently bookmarked links every minute or so.
“Way back in January I released a simple application called TweetNews, which essentially ranks the latest Yahoo News articles by their number of related Twitter messages to determine relevance for really fresh content,” wrote Yahoo architect Vik Singh in an official blog post. “Remarkably, the community responded to it – taking out the server quota in a matter of minutes. So, we thought about where else we could apply this model, and in short order selected a Yahoo property that we felt could benefit greatly from a social-freshness lift: the delicious homepage.”
Singh added that the old Delicious site offered links with 100 bookmarks, which he described as more “authoritative” resources as opposed to “fresh” news.
“For this new Fresh homepage, our system displays recently bookmarked links and tweeted messages focused mostly on technology, web, politics, and media,” explained Singh. “Underneath the hood, Fresh factors several features into the ranking like related bookmark and tweet counts, ‘eats our own dogfood’ by leveraging BOSS to filter for high quality results, as well as stitches tweets to related articles even if the tweets do not provide matching URLs (as 81% of tweets do not contain URLs).”
